Zebkit – Chromium's engine as a library you link, not a runtime you live in

Chrome as a library — light, fast, everywhere, and easy. One API on Linux, macOS and Windows. Add it in a few lines. Introduction zebkit is Chromium's engine as one library you link into your own application: Blink, V8 with every JIT tier, PDFium, FFmpeg and the rest of what Chrome is made of, with nothing of Chrome's browser and nothing of Electron's runtime. Your application stays yours, in C, C++, Rust, Python or JavaScript, with its own windows and toolkit. Where it needs the web, it adds a zebkit view; where it needs a PDF, media, compression or crypto, it calls zebkit's API: in C, or through the bindings for Rust, Python and JavaScript ( zebkit-js , and zebkit.* in the application's own pages). Integrate it, don't build on it. Electron is a base: an application is built inside it, on its runtime, its windows and its packaging. zebkit is a part: an application adds it, as it adds SQLite, and keeps its process, its toolkit and its way of shipping. It runs inside the application's own event loop ( zebkit_init() , zebkit_pump() ), and draws in the application's windows, as frames you draw or in a child of a window you give it, an X11 window, an NSView or an HWND ( examples/native-host ), and gives back the window a page is in for the system's dialogs. Take what you need. Web views, in a window or off-screen with their frames handed to you; a full PDF API; saving what a page plays; your own URL schemes; native UI from JavaScript; Playwright's API and CDP for agents. Use one, or all. The real Chrome engine. Pages see Chromium 157: its user agent and client hints, window.chrome , popups blocked without a click, and nothing of a debugger attached ( docs/API.md has what still differs, Google's sign-in among it). Lighter than Electron. Against the latest Electron, 45.2.1: 34% smaller, a cold start in 2.3 s against 6.6, a page in 29% less memory, and the DOM, text layout and JavaScript level ( Benchmark ). No Node. No second JavaScript runtime and no IPC through one. The application is native code, or JavaScript run by zebkit-js on the engine's V8. Chromium's libraries are yours. 17 C libraries inside the engine, about 7,490 functions on each of Linux, macOS and Windows (7,487 on all three, the rest each system's own), exported under zebkit_vendor_* : SQLite, LevelDB, BoringSSL, zlib, Zstandard, Brotli, ICU, HarfBuzz, libxml2, libwebp, libjpeg-turbo, FFmpeg, dav1d, Opus, libvpx, FreeType and PDFium. You do not ship them twice. PDF built in. A full API on Chromium's PDFium: rendering and tiles, text with layout, search, outline, links, annotations as an editor has them (line endings, cloudy borders, free text with callouts and rich text, stamps, replies and states, measurement, XFDF and FDF), forms, redaction, page editing, merging, attachments, metadata, and signatures checked for integrity; hooks for an application's own annotation kinds, appearances, events with undo, render layers, OCR, fonts, trust and actions. In C, Rust, Python and JavaScript. 2D drawing and shaping. on the engine's Skia and on its HarfBuzz, without shipping either again. Media, saved as it plays. Whatever a page plays, a file, MSE/DASH or HLS, written to MP4 or WebM as it was sent, without re-encoding and without a second download ( ). Bytes as they are. A page's calls to the application go over its frame's own Mojo channel, large ones through shared memory: no base64, the page's JSON handed on as it was written, as fast as Electron's IPC for small calls and faster for large ones. The window around a page, from JavaScript. zebkit.ui draws windows, prompts and dialogs with Chromium's views toolkit: signals, JSX, Tailwind classes, and automation for tests and agents. Rich UI is a page; zebkit.ui is the chrome around it ( docs/UI.md ). Playwright's API, natively. The whole of Playwright (locators, actions that wait until they can be done, keyboard, mouse and touch, routes, dialogs, downloads, contexts, workers, traces, HAR, video) runs inside the engine, without CDP or a Node.js driver: 3 to 10 times faster than Playwright over CDP, and a click in 3 to 5 ms instead of 33 ( , docs/AUTOMATION.md ). Playwright's own clients, in any of its languages, connect to it unchanged with chromium.connect() . Made for agents. tools/zebkit-mcp gives them pages, PDFs, files, media and native windows as MCP tools, over standard input and HTTP, within bounds its operator sets ( docs/MCP.md ). They can also drive zebkit through Playwright's API or over CDP, Chromium's own DevTools server, headless or windowed. Customise it from your code, down to the desktop. Native hooks decide what the engine does, in C, Rust, Python and JavaScript: permissions, navigation, popups, dialogs, downloads, certificates and client certificates, sign-in, network requests and responses at every stage, settings at run time, your own URL schemes, what a page may call, scripts before the page's own ( docs/ROADMAP_HOOKS.md ). And everything a page or the engine would show the person or ask of the system goes through the application: the window's frame (system, overlay or none, with the page as the title bar), menus and the context menu, JavaScript dialogs and sign-in, file and device choosers, screen capture, notifications, the tray, the Dock and taskbar, sharing, the system's theme, power and displays ( Fit it into the desktop , docs/SYSTEM_INTEGRATION.md ). Safe by default. A page has no zebkit object unless the application grants it, per view, per origin and per capability; the origin is the browser's, never the page's word; the renderer stays sandboxed; permissions a browser would ask about are not granted. Engine Chromium 157.0.8103.38 ( upstream.lock ): content layer, Blink, V8 with every JIT tier Linux x86-64, glibc 2.17 or newer (CentOS 7 and later), X11 and ( --ozone-platform=wayland ) Wayland: libzebkit.so.1 and zebkit-helper macOS Apple silicon: Zebkit.framework , built natively or cross-built on Linux ( docs/MACOS.md ) Windows x64, Windows 10 or newer: zebkit.dll and zebkit-helper.exe , cross-built on Linux ( docs/WINDOWS.md ) Version VERSION : 0.4.0 Quick start Get the engine A package is a directory with the library, the helper, the engine's data and include/ . Either unpack a release's archive ( zebkit--.tar.xz from GitHub's releases), or build one: mise run r # dist/release (Linux), dist/release-macos (macOS), dist/release-windows; hours the first time Each archive also holds the tools, built for its system beside the library and ready to run from where it is unpacked: zebkit-run , zebkit-js and zebkit-mcp ( .exe on Windows, sandboxed there too). On an Apple silicon Mac with full Xcode installed, scripts/dist.sh release builds the engine locally into dist/release . Then run scripts/example.sh macos-basic to build and launch the C embedding demo in dist/example/Zebkit Embedded Browser.app . Building needs about 30 GB for Chromium's tree ( docs/BUILD.md ). Below, $PKG is the package directory. Add it to a program you already have zebkit is a library: your program keeps its main() and calls it. This one renders a PDF's first page to a PNG and reads its text, with PDFium and the image encoders inside zebkit, and nothing else to install: #include #include #include /* Your program, your main(): zebkit is just a library it calls. */ int main ( int argc , char * * argv ) { char * error = NULL ; zebkit_pdf * pdf = zebkit_pdf_open_file ( argv [ 1 ], NULL , & error ); if (! pdf ) { fprintf ( stderr , "%s\n" , error ); return 1 ; } /* The first page as a PNG, at twice its size. */ zebkit_pdf_render_options options =